“From the beginning we have referred to Home Based Care (HBC) as the service that Dr. Leena provides by going house to house and treating patients in their homes. Recently however, our plans to have a community outreach team have led us to use the term in reference to a team of volunteers that will help the community outreach program become a sustainable locally run program that will be ongoing for decades to come.

This month, facilitators coordinated with Peace Corps Volunteer Meredith Pinto on a program designed to train 10 volunteers from the 5 different villages in the Mdabulo Ward. The training was funded by donations from African Book Box Society. They will last 28 days, and each volunteer will be taught comprehensively about the national guidelines for home based care volunteers. The volunteers will be trained on a variety of useful topics such as personal health, HIV prevention, and emergency first aid. Each volunteer will be tested at the end of the training. Ideally the NGO will get an opportunity to further train volunteers, and extend the training to more volunteers from all of the surrounding 16 villages. Further training might include permaculture gardening, and child and maternal health.”

Home Base Care Team Training

Today in 2017:

Beginning in March 2011 until December 2013, FCWCT has overseen the training of 22 local volunteers in government-provided Home-based Care training. FCWCT supplies the volunteers with monthly stipends and seminars to expand upon the HBC foundational knowledge, as well as a HBC Program Facilitator to coordinate volunteers in meetings and arrange visits between visiting medical professionals and HBC volunteers’ sick community members.

The HBC Program is a government-approved channel to increase healthcare access in rural areas, and today, it remains an active, life-saving program. HBC volunteers are educated at monthly seminars on the public health issues that plague the Mufindi community such as HIV/AIDS testing, treatment, and prevention; opportunistic infections and related cancers; sexual reproductive health and family planning; and proper nutrition. The volunteers themselves are invested students of public health that will go on to be the teachers of public health in their own villages where they can confidently educate community members. In that sense, there is the potential to reach the 2,500 average population of each village. And the more training and investment each volunteer receives the more effective they will be in educating and leading discussions on critical health topics to their own community members.

Today, HBC volunteers use monthly reporting forms to report their work, engage in monthly seminars, and are the most active they have ever been! They regularly visit over 500 patients in 11 different villages. Within May and June of this year, they helped to facilitate mobile clinics hosted by University of Louisville School of Medicine students and Attending physicians. This is a life-saving program!

Volunteer Stacey Droll with the Home Base Care Team after Passing Their Exams

#10yearsofservice #10daysofaction #10years10days #FCWCT

Our goal is to secure monthly sponsors for each of the 10 projects we are highlighting over this 10 day countdown to our #10yearanniversary!

$25 (£20) per month to our Home-based Care Program will go to support the monthly seminars on community health issues that are held each month to keep our local Tanzanian volunteers engaged, education, and activated in the community.

Registered Charity: 1113719

Mission Statement

“To provide shelter, sustenance, education and medical care for the orphans and foster families in the Mufindi District of Tanzania, to curtail the spread of HIV/Aids, to teach life skills (language, fiscal, vocation and self sufficiency) and to create help and opportunities for future generations”.